Editorial
Readers will be saddened to hear of the death of Elsie Widdowson last year. Together with Professor McCance the food tables that were produced are still the main source of evidence about the nutrient content of foods today. Their partnership lasted for 60 years. Elsie Widdowson's laboratory skills augmented Professor McCance's expertise in research and within a decade they had revolutionised the way the world assessed nutritional values and The Composition of Foods came into publication in 1940.
Afterwards the partnership continued. Their work included research into the chemical composition of the human body and on the variation of individual food intakes. An important aspect of their work was on the relative merits of high and low extraction flours in breadmaking and the vital importance of calcium. Elsie Widdowson was also concerned about dietary deprivation during the years of the Second World War and the effects of rationing with low intakes of meat,dairy products and that essential ingredient, calcium. They experimented with this minimal diet using themselves as guinea pigs.
Over long periods they showed that with calcium supplements the diet imposed by rationing could be adequate. After six months on this strict diet Widdowson and McCance, and others from their group, went to the Lake District to test their fitness and it was found that all were remarkably fit.
Elsie Widdowson was also consulted on the nutritional effects to remedy the gross starvation that was suffered by inmates of the Nazi concentration camps. Sir Edward Mellanby asked her to investigate the effects of different types of bread on the recovery rates of malnourished children in the general population of Germany. She found that low extraction flour, fortified with iron, vitamins of the B complex and calcium, provided children in an orphanage in Germany with all the benefits of bread made with wholemeal flour – she remained, working on this project in Germany, for three years. She presented her findings at the 1949 British Medical Association and brought along children from the orphanage to prove her point.
Back in the UK Elsie Widdowson began work into the foetal development of babies and their high growth rate after birth. With experimental animals she was able to show that deprivation of certain nutrients during these critical periods had a lasting effect on adult physiology. She also studied the diets of cadets at Sandhurst, the problem of undernutrition among children in Uganda and the relative effects on babies who were breast or bottle fed. With regard to this last work, Dr Widdowson found that maize oil was the fat used in commercial infant feeds and that this single polyunsaturated fat eventually comprised 10 per cent of the infant's total body weight.
Dr Widdowson spent most of her working life at the Medical Research Unit of Investigative Medicine and at the Dunn Research Unit. She grew up in London during the time of the First World War. She became of Fellow of the Royal Society in 1976. Longevity ran in her family and Dr Widdowson looked after her mother until she was 107. When asked about the best diet for a long and active life, Dr Widdowson replied that the best diet was a little of what you fancy,but milk with everything.
Dilys Wells
